Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's Hardball, invited on former Cheers star Woody Harrelson to promote his new movie, The Messenger, and
also talk Afghanistan war policy. The Zombieland actor announced that
he was opposed not only to the war in Iraq, but also to the fight in
Afghanistan as he compared it to Vietnam and advised that Barack Obama
should "pull those troops out," to which Matthews chimed: "It doesn't
look like he's pulling out. He's not gonna follow the recommendation of
Mr. Woody Harrelson it looks like...although he might be better off
doing that."

The following is the relevant exchange between Matthews and Harrelson as it was aired on the October 27 edition of Hardball:

CHRIS
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this, the war. I mean we've got two wars
going now, one that hopefully is settling down, we're coming home next
year from Af-, from Iraq. But the other one looks like we might be
beefing up. Your feelings about it?

WOODY HARRELSON: Well I've been pretty vocal about how I feel about
the war which is I'm against it. I think it's, I think the reasons that
we went to war were pretty obvious and I think that,
the thing that happened for me, though, during the course of the
filming of this movie, I got to spend a lot of times with the people in
the Army. And I really came to love the people that I met and I felt
they were heroic. They're not making any money, they're putting their
life on the line every day and they're doing it out of the love of
their country and I really was knocked out by them. And I felt like in
the end I, I, I loathe the war but I love the warriors. So it was a big
thing for me. MATTHEWS: Well the great contradiction is that we
keep hearing stories like General McChrystal says more troops and in a
weird way, the guys out there who are risking and giving their lives
under orders, are, are getting confused with the people giving the
orders. I mean it seems to me the challenge is to give them the right
orders. To give them the right mission, the right wars to fight. And
that's the civilian's job. That's the-

HARRELSON: I think there
is a lot of similarity between what's happening now and what happened
with LBJ. It's an unpopular thing that's happening over there and I
think that, I think, what I would love to see is they bring the troops
home. Because I think it's not a war they should not be fighting.

MATTHEWS:
What do you make of Barack Obama's predicament? He has, he ran and said
that was the "necessary war." That, that Iraq was a mistake, that we
didn't have to do that. But this one we went into chase the Taliban so
we could get rid of them because they allowed al Qaeda operate? Well?
And his challenge now is the military guy over there McChrystal saying,
"I need another 40,000 troops." If he doesn't give him the 40,000, he's
not giving his guy enough to carry out the mission he gave him.

HARRELSON:
Yeah I mean there are a lot of parallels between this and Vietnam and
I, I just hope, you know what LBJ, I think probably what LBJ should
have done was pull those troops out earlier even though it seemed like
that wasn't the move at the time. And I think that's what should happen
here. But then again I'm just an actor.

MATTHEWS: You're also
humble. Thank you. You're right about LBJ. We will discuss the rest of
this issue as the time goes on here. But you're dead right about LBJ. I
don't think we gained anything from '68 and on. That war just continued
and we ended up pulling out the same way we would've pulled out in '65.
Anyway thank you, Woody Harrelson. Good luck with this movie. The movie
is The Messenger. It's obviously heavily freighted with importance
right now as this war continues and perhaps gets escalated some time,
it looks like now between the 7th and the 11th of
this month the President is gonna call up for something, perhaps up to
40,000 more troops, somewhere in between. It doesn't look like he's
pulling out. He's not gonna follow the recommendation of Mr. Woody
Harrelson it looks like. Up next, although he might be better off doing
that.

-Geoffrey Dickens is the senior news analyst at the Media Research Center.

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